Social networking systems allow users to connect to and communicate with other users of the social networking system. Users create profiles on the social networking system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of social networking systems and the significant amount of user-specific information maintained by social networking systems, a social networking system presents an ideal forum for advertising.
Many businesses dedicate significant resources to advertising products or services through advertising campaigns, which may present advertisements or information through social networking systems. A typical advertising campaign includes one or more advertising messages communicated to potential customers to meet an advertising objective. An example objective of an advertising campaign may be to increase awareness of the product being advertised; another example objective may be to generate a favorable opinion of a product to convince people to buy the product. Advertisers are often interested in measuring the effectiveness of their advertisements on the social networking systems in meeting their objectives.
In measuring effectiveness of an advertisement campaign, advertisers often look for advertisement metrics that are both accurate and real-time. However, conventional methods for determining advertisement metrics do not operate in real-time. More specifically, conventional advertisement platforms often present effectiveness metrics as pre-computed reports generated at regular time intervals. Such pre-computed reports do not capture the most recent data impacting the effectiveness metrics. Further, conventional advertisement platforms do not allow advertisers to define their own metrics or data analysis techniques, despite differences between advertisers in measuring advertisement effectiveness.